The competition follows on from the government’sNational Flood Resilience Review that highlighted a wide variety of potential approaches to flood risk, including new techniques and models for assessing land use, water flow, natural flood management, meteorological sensitivities, property-level resilience and economic impacts. In light of these developments, Defra decided to launch a national competition, the first of its kind, to create an opportunity for a wide range of interested parties to apply their particular areas of expertise to the following question:

“If you were responsible for managing the Eden catchment in Cumbria, what flood risk management approaches would you recommend, and why?”

The Sayers and Horritt submission used the Future Flood Explorer (a model they originally developed to support the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment that uses local model results to support an emulation of the flood risk system, Sayers et al, 2015) to quantify present and future risks in the catchment and how successful alternative adaptation measures could be in managing it. The analysis, for the first time, attributed benefits to individual measures when implemented as a broader portfolio response: from natural flood management to traditional defences; from property level measures to flood forecasting and warning.

During the award ceremony Paul noted that:

‘Resilience to flooding’ is not the same as being ‘defended from flooding’. It does mean however using a portfolio of responses to reduce the probability of a flood occurring, limit the exposure should a flood occur and reduce the vulnerability of those that are exposed. A critical barrier to progress in delivering such a portfolio is the lack of credible decision-relevant evidence. This lack of evidence in part reflects the short-comings of traditional modelling approaches that are often too computationally intensive to explore multiple futures and responses at a catchment scale. We’ve developed the Future Flood Explorer to fill this evidence gap – the FFE allows us quickly to explore the effectiveness of flood management measures across the whole catchment both now and in the future, under both climate change and population growth scenarios. We can also use the FFE to explore which measures are most effective at managing future risk'.

Therese Coffee (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) hosted the award ceremony and considered it a real success, with entries from leading groups around the world; some as far away as India. Entries from JBA, Haskoning and Durham University were also awarded prizes. The prize fund was generously supported by United Utilities, Aviva and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).​ A summary of the submission is here.